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| Iraq's Muthanna Army base has women and children in a secret prison, says an Iraqi eyewitness. He says some are family members of Al Qaeda suspect and are used to extract confessions. |
There aren't supposed to be any prisons at the Muthanna Iraqi Army base, let alone ones with children in them.
But a member of the Iraqi security services says that as late as mid-May, he saw children playing in a makeshift detention center here.
"I just wish they would take the children out," he says, recalling the cries of an infant and a 3-year-old named Tiba. "I can't even tell my own wife and children what I do."
The Muthanna facility appears to be operating weeks after a separate undisclosed prison on the base, where more than 400 suspects were held and dozens tortured, was closed.
The witness, who is known to be credible, says he risked speaking to a Western publication because he and some colleagues were sickened by seeing women and children detained. He insisted on anonymity.
"To reach the point of detaining women and their children is unacceptable. A woman's honor is Iraqi honor," he says.
He says at least six women and at least eight children were being held, including the wives of two suspected Al-Qaeda in Iraq leaders, Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri. The two women were detained with their children when their husbands were killed in an April air strike.
A Defense Ministry spokesman at the time confirmed that children had been rounded up. Children under the age of 3 are allowed to remain in detention facilities if their mothers have been arrested.
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